I'm not a big fan of making new year's resolutions; I think they are mainly a way for people to make themselves feel better for a few weeks before they quit doing whatever they said they were going to do and revert back to their old habits. If you wanted something to change SO badly, you would change it without having to wait for the calendar to flip. This "New Year, New Me!" shit has got to go.
Without making a resolution, I'm a fan of setting up goals for the coming year. I've done this for the last few years and I like the way it makes me lay out my yearly plan as far as my training goes. Unfortunately, I haven't hit several of these marks for the last couple of years. I've yet to deadlift 500 pounds or squat 405.
I've written a few times about this, but for the last 5 or 6 months I've been dealing with a string of pain-in-the-ass injuries. Nothing that's super serious; there's been no tears or strains or anything of that nature. But my knee and now my shoulder have just been really shitty to the point where it influences my training. Squatting and doing full versions of the Olympic lifts has been basically impossible to do on a consistent basis. Overhead pressing and pull-ups have been a really uncomfortable strain on my shoulder. For the last 2 months my training has consisted mostly of sled work, farmers carries and the occasional snatch high pull day. Nothing exactly ground-breaking.
I admitted a few weeks ago that I wasn't a good enough weightlifter to over-look all the other types of training in favor of weightlifting, and I'm going to admit now that that program (apparently) didn't work for me. I don't believe that any program, exercise or movement caused my knee pain; I think it's just shit that I need to deal with after so many years of sports and lifting.
This brings me to my goal for 2015: consistency.
One of my mentors, Dan John, has talked several times about how he saw some of the best gains of his life training just twice a week. He performed a few basic exercises two times each week and just focused on progressing those weights. The rest of the week he spent doing other things: some conditioning, throwing, jumping etc. That's where I'm taking my training.
I'm going to focus on two barbell days per week. On these days I will perform snatches, cleans, jerks, deadlifts, squats, bench press, overhead press, pull-ups, rows, etc. The volume and intensity of these days will vary depending on how my body is feeling. I will also have one auxiliary day where I perform a high volume of bodybuilding exercises to get my swole on.
The other days of the week (2-3) I'll focus on some "conditioning" work. I'll do some plyometrics and medicine ball work and then push the sled and carry some weights around for a while. Again, the intensity and volume of these will vary depending on how my body is reacting to this stuff, but I think I should be fine.
Another big goal of mine, that will help with consistency, is to log every one of my training sessions this year. It's something that I've always told people to do but have always been shitty about doing on my own.
I know that if I can train at least twice a week, every week for the whole year I'll be much happier than training 5x a week for 4 weeks and then having to nurse my knee back to health for 5 weeks and repeating the cycle. I'm excited to take this approach and see where it gets me!
What are your goals for the coming year? Have a great day and go lift some heavy shit!
Strength and Conditioning is a pretty interesting field for a lot of reasons; one of the most interesting things to me is how a very large portion of what we learn in school was figured out decades ago. The total amount of information that is truly "new" to the people in this industry is pretty low. There's usually a couple of cool research studies published each year, but very rarely is it something that you would consider groundbreaking. The new strength and conditioning stuff put out each year is usually just the same "old" information organized in a different fashion.
The same stuff that helped get Paul Anderson as strong as a bull back in the 50's and 60's still continue to work better than anything else. Basic compound movements paired with progressive overload and consistent effort trump anything else that you can think of. However, that's not to say that the new books being put out each year are worthless; I continue to take the time to read all sorts of new info and literature that comes out each year because I know that each time I read something knew, there's a high probability that I'll be able to find something useful. I go into each new experience, whether it be a seminar or a book, hoping to find at least ONE thing that I can apply to my career.
With all that being said, this industry isn't terribly hard to figure out. At the end of the day, every well-studied strength coach out there know's just about all of the same information. We've all taken the same sorts of college courses, read the same new books and old Russian texts, receive the same research journals and attend the same seminars. Sure, there are some coaches who have a better grasp of functional anatomy than others and can tell you the origin, insertion and function of every muscle in the body but those people are outliers.
Your success in this field isn't dictated by what you know, since everyone pretty much knows the same shit, but by the manner in which you apply your knowledge. You do need to have a broad knowledge base to begin with, but if you're applying your information in the wrong setting then you're going to get falsely negative results. (Note: I'm not going to be so bold as to suggest that every single coach in this industry is working with the same base of knowledge, there are guys like Eric Cressey, Cal Dietz, Charlie Weingroff or Louie Simmons who are just working on a different playing field than the rest of us. While I am making a generalized statement, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.)
You need to familiarize yourself with a wide variety of training methods and theories, but you also need to remember that everything has a time and a place. Verkoshansky showed us how effective shock training could be in order to increase the rate of force development and reactivity in athletes, but if you take that information and think that it'd be great to try with your 12-year old soccer players then you are sorely missing the point.
There isn't a single thing in this industry that is set in stone. Every athlete and client that you come across is going to have a different needs analysis and will need something tailored specifically towards them. That's why we are called Strength and Conditioning COACHES and not Strength and Conditioning Applicators. If it was as simple as saying "this single program or theory is irrefutably infallible" then every athlete in the world would be following the same exact style of training.
Being a coach is about being able to apply your experiences to the benefit of your athletes and clients. Read everything you can find and attend as many seminars as you can afford. It's not always about new information being presented, but sometimes the way someone presents old information. Have the self-awareness to know when it's the right time to apply the right knowledge.
Many coaches now-a-days will tell you to just keep increasing strength and that training that one aspect will keep you thriving as an athlete. Unless you're a strength athlete who has a weight class with records (powerlifting, weightlifting, strongman) the question of "how strong do I actually have to be?" will come up often.
Well, I'm going to piss on your cereal a little bit here and tell you that there's no hard and fast number for any sport. Truthfully, it all comes down to movement quality and what you can do with that strength.
Let's quickly define what I mean by "strength" in this context: I'm talking about your maximum numbers in any exercise that can be traditionally compared from athlete to athlete. Think squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, barbell and dumbbell pressing, lunges, rows and various upper-body bodyweight exercises. If you find yourself in a situation where you're talking to another coach and comparing athletes bosu ball squat numbers then excuse yourself immediately, pay a homeless guy five bucks to punch you in the neck and then pay him another five to go punch the coach with which you were previously speaking in the neck as well. If you're unsure that an exercise can be easily compared to other athletes then you shouldn't be worrying about that exercise quite so much. Don't major in the minors.
So, back to "how strong do you need to be?". Well, what's your sport and what's your position? This is an answer that can vary quite a bit. Does a basketball player need to be able to squat 500 pounds? What about a football offensive lineman? What's a good bench press number for a baseball player? What kind of numbers should you be trying to achieve with your athletes? Dan John has written several times about his Strength Standards for various populations, but do these always apply?
One of the first things that I should mention is that as long as you're working with athletes who are active in competition (i.e. someone in high school, college or post-grad athletics) you should essentially have no concerns about maxing out someones genetic potential for strength. If you're managing your athletes well then there actually won't be a ton of time to focus solely on increasing their maximum strength. When you're dealing with pre-season, in-season, post-season and early-pre-season meso-cycles you're going to need to spend time chasing a lot of different training adaptations. You'll need your athletes to recuperate, gain weight, get stronger and get faster all at different times of the year. If you find yourself chasing all-out max strength numbers for too much time each year you're going to be doing your athletes a disservice.
So, again, I ask the question "how strong do you have to be?", and the answer continues to be "strong enough to do your job". There are some outliers out there in team sport land who are freaks and can just move a ton of weight; don't worry about them. If you're a football lineman and your best squat is 300 pounds (and you weigh 300 pounds) then you should consider getting your strength levels up. If you squat 800 pounds (holy shitballs) then your strength levels are well above what you can realistically apply in a sport specific context and you should concern yourself with other aspects of training. With that being said "too strong" is something you rarely have to be concerned with.
That's 5'7" 165-pound pitcher Tim Collins doing a set of forward lunges with 300 pounds; not exactly baby weight. Is this too strong? While I'm sure that Tim is capable of squatting a ton more, his sport is a single leg sport and increasing his strength in a single leg pattern will certainly help increase his throwing velocity.
In keeping with the theme of strong-as-fuck baseball players, here's a video from my buddy Dave Rak at the University of Washington of his 3rd baseman hitting a fairly routine set of 3 RDL's at 160kg/352lbs.
The impressive thing about both of these lifts are that they are essentially accessory movements (true that they can double as main movements). An athlete that can RDL or lunge that much weight with a good movement pattern and crisp tempo (as exhibited) is certainly going to be able to transfer that weight into a sport specific context. Will it be beneficial for the coaches to spend the time working these athletes up to a 450-pound lunge or RDL? Probably not, and I know that neither of the coaches responsible for these athletes are writing programs designed with that point of increasing absolute maximum strength in just a few lifts in mind. They are, however, writing programs that will gradually and consistently increase those numbers over a period of time. There is no hard-and-fast strength number for athletes; you don't hit a particular benchmark and then just stop training because you're suddenly "strong enough". It's up to the coach to determine that you've achieved an appropriate quality of strength in one (or several) movements and that your time would best be used by focusing on increasing other qualities while maintaining that level of strength.
Finally, there is really no such thing as "too strong", as Mark Bell says "strength is never a weakness". Nobody has ever said "damn, that athlete was just too strong to make that play". Focus the appropriate amount of time on making your athletes strong as balls and everything else will fall easily into place.
For the last 3 months or so, my training has been dogshit. Not dogshit because of the training itself, but dogshit because of the way my body has felt. Starting 3 or so months ago, I've been getting some pretty serious pain in my left knee. Not pain like "oh boohoo my near is sore", but pain like "oh my knee hurts so bad that I can't sleep". There were many days that it hurt so much to walk that I couldn't even consider training lower body.
I did what I despise most, and resisted the urge to squat for several weeks (I honestly don't know how many: 4-5?) and did what I could. The days that my knee felt good I'd wrap it up super tight and do some power snatches and hang high pulls. I even relented and did some upper body Bro work a few times a week to keep myself sane. The weeks dragged by, and when my knee finally started to feel better I started getting back into power snatches and power clean and jerks. I was still not really squatting because I was just scared of my knee feeling like shit again.
Then, my knee started feeling really shitty again. And so did my wrist, for no apparent reason. So, that's super. Two of the joints that take the brunt of weightlifting hurt just to touch. I, again, waited this pain out for 2-3 weeks and I'm at the point where it's pretty much subsided. Truth be told, the days that I'm squatting and stuff I take 3 Aleve in the morning but oh well!
When my joints were finally on the mend, I had to take a pretty strong look at myself and my training. For the last 3-ish years I've been training exclusively as a weightlifter. I love the sport and I love the training. It's intense and takes concentration and it's a skill that I could work on, which gratified the athlete inside of me.
The honest truth, though, is that I'm a pretty shitty weightlifter. In all honesty, I'm just not a very strong ATHLETE in the first place. Here's a breakdown of my best lifts: 90kg competition snatch (I snatched 95kg once a year ago at Ivan Rojas's birthday, where we also had Cuban cigars and 19 pounds of lobster), 115kg competition clean and jerk (118kg one day at Rubber City Weightlifting), 465lb deadlift, 365lb squat, 315lb front squat and 275lb paused bench press. I've push pressed (behind the neck) 110kg, I think my best stone load (I don't know the load height) was 230 pounds and my best farmers walk (on handles) was 250 per hand for maybe 30-40 feet. At CrossFit Resilience I stood up a 900 pound Yoke and got absolutely crumpled when I tried to take a step. I've done 2 non-consecutive ring muscle-ups and can't do a HSPU. I've only ever had legit abs for about a year and usually maintain a fantastically pedestrian bodyfat of 15% or so. My best ever vertical jump was 33" and I've never dunked a basketball.
(No, that's not 465, but it was a PR at the time)
What's the point of all of this self-deprecating information that I just laid out there? It's that, despite my love of weightlifting, I'm not good enough at it to be committed to a type of training that is currently causing me some serious pain (note: I'm not saying that weightlifting is the cause of my pain, but the volume of squatting and holding a loaded bar overhead is certainly not making it easy on my joints). I decided that I needed to change up my training to something that would allow me to continue to train consistently and pain-free.
Very recently I read a great article by Chad Wesley Smith that outlined the type of training he has done as a competitive thrower. I then sat down and read the e-book HVIII by Matt Vincent, another guy who was a competitive thrower in college and is now an international Highlands Games competitor. While the training style outlined in both texts is nothing new to me, the concept of the training immediately hit me in my happy place. Pretty simply, I wanna get stronger, more powerful, leaner, jump higher, get faster and pretty much just be a fucking savage.
The ideas proposed are pretty simple. If you want to jump higher and move faster, you need to do that. If you want to get stronger, you have to move heavy weights quickly and do it consistently. If you want to get leaner you need to do some conditioning (gulp; working on that) and if you want to stay healthy you need to do targeted auxiliary work. Again, this is all information that I've known for a while, but reading these two texts from these two guys put things into a particular perspective that I needed right now.
Rather than write a very specific and detailed program for myself, I've organized my training week into a template where I can pick and choose some stuff based on how I'm feeling. Here's an example of my week.
- Cable Flys 4x10 / Cannonball Cable Curls 4x10 / Cable Face Pulls 4x10 / Lu Raises 4x10
Friday: Deadlift Emphasis
- RB Broad Jumps 4x5 / MB Keg Toss 4x5
- Hang Power Clean (worked up to 3x3 at 100kg)
- Speed Deadlift vs mini bands (worked up to 4x2 at 120kg)
- Deadlift singles EMOTM 5x1 at 180kg
- 6" elevated deadlifts 3x3 at 170kg
- Various loaded carries
Truth be told, I've only been following this template now for two weeks but I feel really good. I'm enjoying everything so far and like the freedom that I have to add/subtract things as I see fit. I'm taking it easy on the plyo's so far because I want to take some time to let my knee adjust and see how it handles the jumping. Over the next few weeks I intend to add a second set of plyometrics to the start of my three main lifts. The total volume of lifting that I'm doing feels good so far and having two days off from heavy stuff to focus on auxiliary work is going to make a big difference in the way I both feel and look in the long run.
One of my goals over the next few months is to get my vertical jump and max touch up a few inches. About a month ago when we were testing our boys basketball team, I stepped in and tested my vertical at 31" and my max touch (with approach) at 10'6". Neither number is bad, but my max touch needs to get up. Kids who had verticals 4" lower than mine were max touching 3-4" higher than mine. Here's how the math works: my standing reach is 92" and my max touch was 126"; that's a 34" difference which means that there's only a 3" difference between my standing vertical jump and a jump with a full approach. This all means that my strength levels are fine but I need to get more reactive. This is the reason I want to include more plyometrics and will be doing a lot of weightlifting work from the hang position.
My strength goals all, honestly, remain pretty vague: I haven't seen a PR in any main lift in about a year and I'd like to see some of those numbers get moved around a little bit. Squatting 183kg and deadlifting 226kg would awesome in 2015. I'm still hoping to compete at the Arnold this year (it was a fun experience) so I'd love to be able to get on the platform and make some competition PR's.
That's where I've taken my training as of late and I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading! Have a great day and go lift some heavy shit!
The "Perfect Program" is something that has been sought after by strength coaches and athletes since the dawn of physical culture. People want to know the quickest and most efficient way to get bigger, faster, stronger and leaner. Everyone wants to believe that there's one perfect way to achieve these things, so what is it?
The big secret is that there is no perfect program. There's no secret to achieving all those things besides consistency and hard work. Damn near any program (well written or not) that you give to someone will result in some sort of progression when performed with the appropriate intensity and consistency. One of the industry quotes that coaches love to throw around is that "everything works...for about 6 weeks".
Here's where it gets interesting though; the most perfectly-written, over-analyzed, constructed and reconstructed program that follows all the parameters set forth by your favorite coach/idol is going to be dogshit if you don't apply it to the right athlete at the right time.
The best program you've ever written is still very capable of being crap if you don't use it when the time is right. If you take your amazing program and give it to an athlete who's not ready for it, in the wrong part of their annual plan, or it just doesn't fit their overall training then you're going to get poor results.
All of the best ingredients for apple pie are going to taste like dogshit if you put it into your beef stew. (analogy game = strong)
Take, for example, the program that I wrote for Cleveland Elite Development. It is, all in all, one of the simpler programs that I've ever written. It's a low-volume, low-intensity program that is intended to minimize training stress and have little (if any) recovery period where the athlete is experiencing muscle soreness or fatigue. Basically, I wanted to introduce strength training to a group of athletes who have an extremely high training load as it is and provide juuuust enough stress to induce the minimal amount of positive training adaptation. I also wanted to utilize specific exercises that would help reduce/minimize injuries. For this particular group of athletes, any positive adaptation is going to be a step in the right direction.
Would I have induced a much more significant training adaptation by giving them banded deadlift singles contrasted with hurdle hops, Anderson front squats and power snatches from knee height blocks with heavy-ass-sled-drags? Totally. Their strength increases would've gone through the roof! But at what cost?
Each of the girls would've seen a monster increase in the perceived exertion of their running program, would've missed their weekly mileage and would've spent more time flirting with soft tissue injuries caused by fatigue and soreness from their training. The goal of the program should always be to get the athlete a positive training adaptation while allowing them to get better technical/sport specific skills for their sport. These girls are runners and need to be out there running.
When writing your perfect programs please make sure that you are writing a program that is perfect for those athletes at that point in time. It's easy to become over-excited about all the awesome shit that you can apply to an athlete, but sometimes that's going to be counter-productive. Sometimes athletes are going to be primed to come in and dominate weights every day and there will be other times that they need to just get a training effect and go home. Make sure you know which is which.
As a strength coach one of the most important things you can do for your athletes is manage their stress effectively. While you can't necessarily help them deal with their parents or significant other, there are several training techniques you should take into account when developing your athletes programs.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "talking to your athletes" in a discussion about reducing stress in athletes. Mental stress and physical stress go hand in hand, so you need to be aware if an athlete is going through something personally, has a ton of schoolwork or happens to be feeling under the weather. You should also have an idea of what the athletes sport load is like at any given time of the year. It'd be great if you could get the sport coaches to pay attention to what you're doing in the weight room, but the chances of that happening are as good as Tony Gentilcore going on a date with Tracy Anderson. If your athletes are under significant mental stress or getting smoked down at their sport practice, then it just doesn't make a ton of sense to beat the piss out of them in the weight room. Something is eventually going to give, and unfortunately it'll probably be their body. You can avoid that by simply communicating with them.
Now here are some tips you can use in your programming to help keep your athletes strong, healthy and performing well.
1) Utilize Unilateral Loading Patterns
When you apply a unilateral load to any exercise you change stabilization requirements significantly. You can do this with just about any exercise and any level of athlete. Doing a squat with 1-KB racked at your chest will allow you to train a squat pattern with a much lower intensity (weight) and a different requirement for the rest of your body. Personally, I don't often use uni-lateral loading with the main movement in my programs, but I'll apply it extensively to auxiliary work. Loading movements like lunges, RDL's, horizontal/vertical presses and rowing variations is a really good way to get an awesome training effect while using a relatively low weight.
Let's use the reverse lunge as an example. If your athlete is able to do a set of 8/leg reverse lunges with two 50-pound dumbbells, they are using 100 total pounds to get their training effect. Now if you give that athlete one 50-DB and have them hold it contralaterally (the opposite hand as the forward leg in this example) they'd have to work quite a bit harder to maintain a vertical torso and not fall over, with 50% of the weight. To make it even harder, you could have them hold the DB ipsilaterally (same hand as the forward leg). The next progression would be 1-KB racked at the chest (both contra- and ipsi-laterally). The variation that will challenge your athletes stability the most would be 1-KB in the overhead position. A significantly under-utilized variation would be one (heavier) side-loaded KB with one (lighter) KB in the overhead position. This gives you the ability to load the exercise more without coming anywhere close to your maximum effort. All of these variations allow you to give your nervous system a break while learning to develop some total body tension that will benefit you when you go back to heavy bilateral loading.
2) Ditch Some of the Fancy Things
There are a ton of tricks that coaches are using nowadays to get people strong; chains, bands, tempos, partial reps, dead starts and specialty bars all come to mind. These tricks work really well and with good reason. They, generally speaking, add quite a bit of stress to your central nervous system. Yes, applying a tempo to a squat will reduce the overall load on their body and could be considered stress reliever for a general population client. An athlete who has a ton of stress being put upon their bodies from other sources is going to find a tempo squat to be very fatiguing. Bands, too, are a great way to get somebody strong and fast, but because of the way your body handles accommodating resistance athletes will find exercises utilizing bands to be quite difficult to recover from. While these may all be great tactics to develop powerful athletes, if they increase the fatigue and physical stress on your athletes too much then you'll never be able to see their benefits. Theres nothing wrong with good old fashioned progressive overload once in a while.
3) Keep It Short
At the end of the day, athletes are athletes. While you may now just how much improvement they will see in their sports by focusing on training for a while, it's tough to make that happen. Your job, as a strength coach, is to get them more prepared for their sport. Putting your athletes through a 90 minute lift when their sport demands are high is just a good way to create an injury in the weight room that could otherwise be avoided. You may have written a beautiful and fantastic program that would otherwise be perfect, but when they are smoked it's not an awful idea to cut it down and let them do their "big money" exercises and then go eat and sleep. It doesn't mean you wrote a bad program, it means that you were able to see that it wasn't the right time to apply it.
The idea for this post came to me recently because I had just written a training program for Kelsis distance running team, Cleveland Elite Development coached by Glenn Andrews. Kelsi has been running with him for right around a year and during that time I've noticed a trend in the types of injuries that the girls have been experiencing. The most prominent and debilitating injury is stress fractures; often in the shins, hips and feet. These keep the girls from running at all and are a major setback. I wrote them the program so that they can start getting some weight training in to help counteract and hopefully diminish the bony and soft tissue injuries that plague runners. I needed to make the program such that they would have time to actually do the lifts (between being real people and running 70+ miles per week) and still feel good enough to get in their miles at the appropriate paces (they are runners, after all, and not lifters). Is it a "perfect program"? Probably not, but it is pretty much exactly what they need right now. Sometimes what the athletes need "right now" is the most important.
Being a strength and conditioning coach is interesting (for several reasons), but for me one of the best parts of the job is the impact that you can personally make on an athlete. I don't mean the impact you can make physically on them, but the impact that you can make on them as a person. Fairly often, athletes will start to look towards their strength coaches as mentors/friends and will develop a pretty close bond with them.
I think a lot of it has to do with the S&C coach's role in making athletes stronger and healthier and the athletes understanding of that. They can often see how we are helping them build towards their goals as an athlete and they appreciate that.
However, once in a while, you get an athlete (or athletes) who are just butt-holes. There's any number of reasons that you end up working with an athlete who's a turd. Sometimes they think they know what they really need and you don't, sometimes they don't see the benefits derived from training and think it's a waste of their time, and sometimes they are just self-entitled products of this generation and don't understand why your stupid rules should apply to them because they are clearly better than you and everyone else in the vicinity. Regardless of the reasons or the way that it manifests itself, their shitty attitude towards training and being in your gym will be readily evident to everyone else that's around.
I currently have an athlete like this that I work with. He's a prep-year basketball player which automatically puts him a step behind many other athletes. I think it's safe to say that many coaches within the strength and conditioning industry would agree that basketball players tend to start off with a much more lackadaisical attitude towards the weight room than athletes from other sports. On top of that, he's from a family that is apparently able to afford a fairly expensive prep program, which might explain some of the entitlement issues that he apparently has. You would think, though, that having all the schools he wanted to play basketball at pass over him as a senior in high school would alert him to the fact that he is, in fact, not the best basketball player since Michael Jordan. If he was as good as he thinks he is, then he wouldn't be here in the first place.
His complete apathy for everything revolving around strength and conditioning has manifested itself in a few ways. The first was that he consistently took upwards of 2 minutes to go from his A1 exercise to his A2 and then again to A3. It wasn't a break he took due to fatigue; he simply would stand there and look around at the other athletes. The next significant exhibition of not having a single fuck to give was when the director of my gym was down at the basketball court putting the whole team through some hellish conditioning for leaving the weight room littered with water bottles for a few days. Despite being instructed to touch the lines every single time, this particular athlete continuously didn't even make an attempt to touch his lines. When singled out and confronted about this at the end of the workout he responded with "I didn't think it was important".
The most glaring example of this athletes poor attitude is seen by me on a thrice weekly basis. Three times a week his training group comes in. Each time I say "guys, let's go, on the turf!" to start their warmup, I know without a doubt who's going to be last off of his foam roller and who is going to take the slowest walk to the turf. He consistently bullshits his way through the warmups and no matter what I say to him in front of the other athletes he continues to repeat the behavior. I finally had enough of it and sort of lost my shit on the entire group of athletes the other day (whoops).
I'm not suggesting that it was the CORRECT way to handle the situation, but I think it was an EFFECTIVE way to handle this particular situation. Were I able to go back and re-do it, would I handle it differently? Yes, I probably would. I'm not a coach who yells very often, so I feel like the one time I do it, it will shake some things up. Unfortunately only time will tell if what I did was effective or not. The next measure I take will end up being a one-on-one meeting where I lay out the issues and expectations just a little more personally.
Coaches, how else could this situation have been handled differently? Does anyone else find this to occasionallybe an effective way to handle a particular athlete?
Thanks for reading and for the feedback; have a great day and go lift some heavy shit!
